The heart of a computer is an assembly that is referred to as a magnetic disk drive. The magnetic disk drive includes a rotating magnetic disk, write and read heads that are suspended by a suspension arm adjacent to a surface of the rotating magnetic disk and an actuator that swings the suspension arm to place the read and write heads over selected circular tracks on the rotating disk. The read and write heads are directly located on a slider that has a media facing surface (MFS). The suspension arm biases the slider into contact with the surface of the disk when the disk is not rotating, but when the disk rotates air is swirled by the rotating disk. When the slider rides on the air bearing, the write and read heads are employed for writing magnetic impressions to and reading magnetic impressions from the rotating disk. The read and write heads are connected to processing circuitry that operates according to a computer program to implement the writing and reading functions.
The write head includes at least one coil, a write pole and one or more return poles. When a current flows through the coil, a resulting magnetic field causes a magnetic flux to flow through the write pole, which results in a magnetic write field emitting from the tip of the write pole. This magnetic field is sufficiently strong that it locally magnetizes a portion of the adjacent magnetic disk, thereby recording a bit of data. The write field, then, travels through a magnetically soft under-layer of the magnetic medium to return to the return pole of the write head.
A magnetoresistive sensor such as a Giant Magnetoresistive (GMR) sensor or a Tunnel Junction Magnetoresisive (TMR) sensor can be employed to read a magnetic signal from the magnetic media. The magnetoresistive sensor has an electrical resistance that changes in response to an external magnetic field. This change in electrical resistance can be detected by processing circuitry in order to read magnetic data from the adjacent magnetic media.
As the need for data density increases there is an ever present need to decrease the size of a magnetic read sensor. With regard to linear data density along a data track, this means reducing the gap thickness of a magnetic sensor. Currently used sensors, such as the GMR and TMR sensors discussed above, typically require 4 magnetic layers, 3 ferromagnetic (FM) and 1 antiferromagnetic (AFM) layer, along with additional nonmagnetic layers. Only one of the magnetic layers serves as the active (or free) sensing layer. The remaining “pinning” layers, while necessary, nonetheless consume a large amount of gap thickness. One way to overcome this is to construct a sensor as a “scissor” sensor that uses only two magnetic “free” layers without additional pinning layers, thus potentially reducing gap thickness to a significant degree. However, the use of such a magnetic sensor results in design and manufacturing challenges, such as the need to maintain proper magnetic relative orientations of the magnetic free layers.